Gender Divides In Academia and Other Disciplines

by John Holbo on February 8, 2011

I haven’t gotten around to contributing to the great Gender Divides thread. But Kevin Drum links to, and invites discussion of, a similarly striking data set about books and book reviews (presumably this set overlaps academia, but includes lots of non-academics). I would be curious to see a list of 5000 professions/jobs, from attorney to zookeeper, with gender breakdowns. I wonder what proportion of professions/jobs, in general, have a statistically highly significant gender skew (that isn’t explicable in some obvious way, e.g. NFL quarterbacks are all male.) To what degree do professions/jobs, in general, tend to become ‘gendered’, by whatever mechanism(s) that gendering may be engendered? It would be good to establish, as a baseline, whether, in exhibiting this striking range of gender imbalances, the academic disciplines ‘look like America’, as it were – i.e. a land in which a large number of professions tend to be strikingly ‘gendered’.